Born a century ago in Texas, Robert Rauschenberg lived and worked most of his life in New York City and Captiva Island, Florida, where he died at 82 in 2008. He would have turned 100 on Oct. 22, 2025, which accounts for the Rauschenberg centenary commemorations at art institutions all over the globe. Certainly not the least of these is “Rauschenberg 100: New Connections” at Easton’s Academy Art Museum – the centerpiece of which is “Chinese Summerfall,” a 100-foot-long photographic frame-by-frame panorama shot and assembled in 1982-’83.
Due to the scale and delicate handling it requires, this singularly epic exhibit all its own is rarely displayed in public. So how did it land in Easton, you ask? Donald Saff, Rauschenberg’s collaborator on “Chinese Summerfall,” lives in Oxford, also home to his studio, where parts of the 100-foot-long photograph, among several other of the artist’s major projects, were put together.
At the time, 1982, Rauschenberg was working closely with Saff at the University of South Florida in Tampa, where his Graphicstudio was located. Rauschenberg was already renowned for, as he put it, “connecting art to life,” which incorporated brushstrokes, snapshots, fabric, everyday found objects, plus newspaper and magazine clippings into collage commentaries he called “Combines” – a hybrid he invented by melding aspects of painting, sculpture, and photography.
“Chinese Summerfall,” however, is a purely photographic endeavor, the artist described as a “compositional tale unrolled according to its own appetite. What is already there dictates what comes next,” he said, before adding: “The witness – my camera – recorded not everything we saw, just everything we looked at.”
Indeed, there is a randomness to what Rauschenberg and his camera “looked at” in his 100-foot photo winding its way around AAM’s Lederer Gallery – encompassing urban alleys, ill-lit hotel rooms, wall paintings and statuary fragments next to utility poles. But there are manipulated scenes, too – a gnarled tree trunk spliced against a mountain vista at the start of the ribbon of photographs, while midway through, a pair of spoked wheels superimposed over a section of the Great Wall of China, concluding with understated irony – a sideways huddle of chickens.
A potential political controversy was averted, Saff recalls, when Chinese authorities objected to a blurry image of Lenin and Stalin together. When asked to relinquish the negative, Saff surrendered an unexposed roll of film instead.
Across the hall in the Healy Gallery, 30 framed stills from Academy Art’s permanent collection include a few that didn’t make the cut for the 100 feet of “Chinese Summerfall.” But most instructive is the large printer’s proof typical of the 8-to-10-foot sections into which the finished Rauschenberg Foundation project was divided before final assembly.
As a follow-up to “Chinese Summerfall,” Saff also collaborated on the Rauschenberg Overseas Culture Initiative which brought the artist’s work to nations isolated from the influence of Western democracies, including the Soviet Union, East Germany, Cuba (then ruled by Fidel Castro), Chile (under dictator Pinochet), and Venezuela, now much in the news.
The ROCI world tour culminated in a 1991 National Gallery of Art exhibition in Washington, after which Roschenberg was awarded the Hiroshima Prize for Peace through Art. About that time, Saff moved to Oxford, where he opened Saff Tech Arts, representing, along with Rauschenberg, other such innovators as Roy Lichtenstein, Nancy Graves, and James Turrell.
For a wider appreciation of Rauschenberg as America’s and perhaps the world’s most original and relatable post-World War II artist, consider a visit to his adopted hometown to take in “Robert Rauschenberg’s New York: Pictures From the Real World” at the Museum of the City of New York, running through April 19, 2026. The show traces his evolution from photography into an integration of painting, sculpture, and found-object hoarding to create a new art form of collage mosaics.
Steve Parks is a retired New York arts critic now living in Easton.
‘RAUSCHENBERG 100: NEW CONNECTIONS’
Through May 3, 2026, Academy Art Museum, 106 South St., Easton.
Related programs: Pianist Thomas Moore performs “White Paintings and Silent Music – John Cage and Robert Rauschenberg in the 1950s,” Friday, Jan. 16, 2026; the artist’s son Christopher’s lecture: “Robert Rauschenberg’s Photographic Legacy in Context,” Saturday, Feb. 21, and collaborator Donald Saff’s lecture: “Robert Rauschenberg in China and the Overseas Cultural Interchange,” Friday, March 27, all at 6 p.m. Other current AAM exhibits: “Clay: The Power of Repetition,” through Feb. 15, 2026, and “The Skin of Water,” through Feb. 22, academyartmuseum.org
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